HiddenMysteries: Ted Haggard, The Root of All Evil

Safe to assume they discovered overwhelming evidence of something beyond a nifty little meth fetish and an innocent "massage"? Let us ponder...

UPDATE 11/4: Well, there you have it. Pastor Ted was officially dismissed as head of the New Life megachurch Saturday, after the church's sinister-sounding "Overseer Board" -- not, mind you, a panel of angry pagan liberal atheists out for blood, but a group of Ted's supporters and peers who, we can assume, desperately wanted him to be innocent -- this board, without much hesitation but also without providing any juicy details, found him guilty of "sexually immoral conduct."

"So what you do is, you take that big male hooker's
luscious nipple and you squeeze it between your
fingers like this, like it was the
Lord's own divine lemondrop, and then..."

So now we know: Ted Haggard, evangelical overlord and leader of upwards of 30 million happy homophobes and nervous Bush supporters, a man who says he calls Dubya once a week to, presumably, talk about God and gays and sin and cattle and sex and milkshakes and who knows what the hell else, we now know Pastor Ted most definitely did not probably well OK maybe I mean obviously we all know he did but he's denying it anyway even though it couldn't be more obvious, Ted did not have lots and lots of gay sex with a big handsome burly gay prostitute for three years, and oh yes also got massages and snorted lots of meth and by the way he had quite a deliciously good time of it, too. This is what absolutely did not happen, OK? Even though you know it did. Shhh.

Ah, Pastor Ted. He is a piece of work. He is a bit loud and crass and a little disorienting and very odd looking and just blindingly car-salesmany in his beautifully bloated Christian shtick. And oh yes, he is totally not secretly, wildly gay.

You want to see Haggard in action? You're in luck: For here is the recent, excellent BBC documentary, "The Root of All Evil," by noted evolutionary biologist/atheist Richard Dawkins, author of the NYT bestseller "The God Delusion." The film is Dawkins' examination of the horrors and intellectual/spiritual/physical violence wrought upon the planet's humans in God's name. And it's playing right now at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, and at the Roxie in San Francisco. Dawkins interviews Haggard, and, well, it's pretty amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ8_bIji7gQ&eurl=

Can't make the trek to the theaters? You're in luck again: just click on over to that glorious repository of all things pagan and godless, YouTube (or just click the image above to start it playing right now). There's Pastor Ted, in Part I, in his Colorado lair, leading his frightening New Life Church in all sorts of happy warm numbing groupthink.

The interview with Haggard starts right around the 19th minute, and runs for about ten minutes. Be sure to enjoy the kicker at the end, when Ted suddenly decides to throw Dawkins and his film crew off his church property, because Dawkins dared to suggest that creationism is just a little, you know, idiotic.

Makes you wonder what Ted might've done if Dawkins offered him some meth and a "backrub," no?

www.sfgate.com

Ted Haggard, The Root of All Evil

Saturday, November 04 2006 @ 08:57 PM CST